Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Pinguy OS alpha 1 has been released yesterday, bringing some new default applications and some other interesting changes.

Even though it's based on Ubuntu 11.04, Pinguy OS 11.04 will use the classic Gnome (panels) 2.32.x as the default interface and the final release should be a lot like this alpha 1. What could change is removing the Global Menu with the AppMenu but for the moment there's a memory leak in the AppMenu so that's not an option yet.

Also, Pinguy OS alpha 1 comes with various PPAs for the applications it ships with but the final version will use just one Pinguy OS branded PPA that will have all the packages mirrored from the other PPAs, but tested firstly so this should bring more stability and control over the updates.

Changes in Pinguy OS 11.04 alpha 1

Ultracopier has been added as a default application. It can be used to copy things faster and comes with a resume option for the copy process, speed limitations and more. Also, Oracle Java is now default instead of OpenJDK because "openjdk-6-jre is not allowed with some bank sites".

Other new default applications are: Rapid Photo Downloader, XBMC, Vino, Vineyard and more. The old default applications are there too: Nautilus Elementary, Deluge, Firefox, Thunderbird, Rhythmbox, LibreOffice, MintMenu and so on (basically the same as 10.04.2) but updated to the latest version.

There are of course a lot of other minor new tweaks which you'll discover once you give Pinguy OS 11.04 a try. For example, there's a new Firefox theme:

Also, the latest Pinguy OS 11.04 alpha 1 comes with new ConnMan which has replaced the regular Network Indicator:

Besides the applications, there are some other changes. For instance, because Unity has been disabled, you can't drag a window to the side to move it to another desktop (so says Pinguy, I didn't try this and I'm not sure what are the implications of disabling Unity but still using Compiz). Instead, when draging a window to the sides, the behavior will be the same as in Unity: the window will be resized to half of the desktop and dragging it to the top will maximize the window.

Important note: Compiz has been turned off by default, at least in this first Alpha 1, but you can turn it on from the Startup Applications dialog.

OEM

In Pinguy OS 11.04 you can install it as usual with the username "oem" and the same "oem" for password and once you customize everything on the computer you can run:

sudo oem-config-prepare

Then restart the computer and on the next boot it will ask the user to setup his account and will delete the original "oem" account.

Download Pinguy OS 11.04 alpha 1

Pinguy OS 11.04 alpha 1 is only available for 64bit. Starting with the beta there should be 32bit ISO images available for download too.